PULTENEY STREET SURVEY - SPRING 2017

The Great Lake Effect

by Steven Bodnar

When cold air passes over the warmer
waters of a lake, the result is lake effect
snow. Professor of Geoscience Neil Laird
and Assistant Professor of Geoscience
Nick Metz recently co-authored two scientific journal
articles on the subject
in the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological
Society and International
Journal of Climatology.

Their article, “The
Ontario Winter Lakeeffect
Systems (OWLeS)
Field Project,” details
an extensive scientific
field project that brought
together several colleges,
universities and agencies
from across the country
to collaborate on winter
weather research in the
Lake Ontario and Finger
Lakes regions.

“The article provides an
overview of the OWLeS
field project and future
pathways for research,”
says Metz. “It was the
largest project of its kind
and so much data was
collected that people will be analyzing it for years to
come.”

The article outlines how the project collected
unprecedented observations of highly complex lakeeffect
snow events by dispensing instrumentation for
measuring atmospheric data, deploying Doppler on
Wheels radar, using the University of Wyoming King
Air research aircraft, and implementing other datacollecting
efforts. The team also collaborated with the
National Weather Service to enhance data analysis,
modeling and forecasting.

“There were about 10 HWS students involved with
the field research and another 12 to 15 HWS students
involved with the data analysis,” says Metz. “They have
been able to work with some unique datasets and try
to unravel the processes that contributed to heavy,
often difficult to forecast, lake-effect snow events.
Our students have been able to step out beyond the
classroom and do hands-on research with faculty. The
students universally rose to the challenge.”

For example, during lake-effect snow events, HWS
student researchers worked shifts in extreme cold and
wind to launch weather balloons at locations across
western and central New York to collect meteorological
data such as wind speed and temperature throughout
the atmosphere.

Former student researchers from the OWLeS project
now find themselves breaking additional ground in the atmospheric science community. Macy
Howarth ’16 is working toward her master’s
at SUNY Albany and plans to continue on
to a Ph.D. program. “Being a graduate
student is a lot about taking what you learn
in the classroom and applying it to your
research, making the connections, and being
independent. I was fortunate at HWS to have
several opportunities to pursue research and
learn these skills prior to actually being a
graduate student,” she says. “Both Nick Metz
and Neil Laird have been invaluable to my
education, and I cannot thank them enough.”

The climatology journal article, “Climatology
of cold season lake-effect cloud bands for
the North American Great Lakes,” uses
satellite imagery to provide a comprehensive
climatological description of the seasonal
and interannual variability of lake effect
cloud bands. It also provides an unmatched
database related to the occurrence of coldseason
lake effects in the Great Lakes region.

The study found that across the cold season,
about 60 to 80 percent of days per month
have lake effect clouds over some portion
of the Great Lakes region and on lake effect
days, nearly 75 percent had lake effect activity
present over several lakes simultaneously.

“This shows that lake effect is a substantial
part of the wintertime Great Lakes weather,”
Metz says. “And it quantifies how much lake
effect varies in any particular winter and how
much it varies from one winter to another.”

“The student involvement on this project
was substantial and included many students
spanning across several summer research
programs at HWS,” says Laird.

Metz adds: “HWS is a unique institution
where students can start very early as
undergraduates working on research and
meaningfully complement their academic
year studies.”